The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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March 30, 2013

Bombay was renamed Mumbai in 1996,
largely at the instigation of Bal Thackeray, the firebrand politician who died
last year. Thackeray founded the Hindu far right Shiv Sena party, which
provoked inter-communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims both in
the city and across India. As for “Bombay”, he felt the name had too many
associations with the city’s colonial past – its replacement is said to honour
the city’s patron deity, the Goddess Mumbadevi. What, I wonder, did Thackeray
make of his own surname, one which his father adopted out of admiration for the
Victorian novelist?

The writer Suketu Mehta relates a
tense interview with Thackeray in his brilliant contemporary chronicle of his native
city, Maximum City: Bombay lost and found (2004) - what must be one of the last
books with the old name in its title. At one point Thackeray firmly corrects
Mehta’s use of the name “Bombay”.

Mehta points out that if the fourth
largest city in the world in terms of population “were a country by
itself in 2004, it would rank fifty-four”. On reflection it’s extraordinary
that this megalopolis of 20 million plus should have changed its name so easily – was
there any protest? I don’t remember now. Admittedly the old name is clearly
recognizable in the new one. But nevertheless can you imagine Boris Johnson as
mayor of London deciding to rename the city Londinium? Think of the
administrative upheaval.

But as Mehta wrote ten years ago:
“name-changing is in vogue in all of India nowadays: Madras has been renamed
Chennai, Calcutta, that British-made city, changed its name to
Kolkata”. Bangalore has since become Bengaluru (but will that one ever
properly catch on, with its unnecessary extra syllable?). I loved the
name Madras, but I appreciate these decisions aren’t made with my
aesthetic preferences in mind. And there’s something to be said for a proper
name change like Madras to Chennai, a clean break. As for Mumbai, it doesn’t
trip off the tongue as easily (for me at least) as Bombay, but it’s official and one should
respect that - I don't live there after all.

Penguin India seem
to view it differently. I had an email exchange with a TLS contributor recently over his
use of “Bombay” in a review – I suggested changing it to Mumbai but he pointed
out that the author of the book in question opted for
Bombay, with the clear blessing of his publishers Penguin. You say Bombay, I say Mumbai
. . . .

I think of another megacity and how
it has got its naming so right: New York,
whose names add up to one big
topographical prose poem - this is hardly an original observation I’m sure:
Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Lower East Side, Morningside Heights, Columbus
Circle, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, F.D.R. Drive, Staten Island - the list goes
on.

Martin Amis for one saw the music in these names. Think of this riff on John
Self’s travails in Money: “My head is a city, and various pains have now taken
up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a
cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a
duplex in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of
jaw-loss. As for my brain, it’s Harlem up there, expanding in the summer
fires”.

Which brings me to the thought: can place
names be ranked aesthetically? I think they can and I’ve compiled a list of twenty
that particularly appeal to me. I’ve excluded country names, and written out of
contention names that flaunt their beauty, such as Belo Horizonte, Saratoga
Springs, Alice Springs, Pacific Palisades, Tierra del Fuego, Martha’s Vineyard,
Grimsby . . . .

It’s a very subjective thing of
course, and I’m probably revealing a tin ear here (I haven’t tried them out on
anybody). I particularly like names that are hybrids, such as Cox’s Bazar, in
Bangladesh - or ones that end in “ville” - excluding the deeply unimaginative
Townsville in Australia.

Here they are, in no particular order
– I could easily come up with 20 more and call them my favourites too, and 20
more after that: Devizes in Wiltshire, for example, or Galashiels. I kick off
with Jacksonville, although it was a close-run thing between it and Galveston,
both having that rather beautiful stress on the first syllable.

March 28, 2013

Digressions in the fiction of Javier Mar­ías (see yesterday’s
post) can be extensive. “My intention is not that I irritate the reader”, Mar­ías
told James Runcie at the Southbank last week. “The digression can be as interesting [as
the action that preceded it]. I compare it to . . . the second part of The Godfather – there are the two different times.
Al Pacino in the present and Robert De Niro in the past, in Sicily . . . . When
the film jumps you’re annoyed. But Sicily is also so interesting that when it
goes back to the present you say ‘oh’ . . .". Mar­ías went on to mention Don Quixote ("[They’re] about to hit each other with a sword and Cervantes stops the action.
He never comes back to it . . . . That’s even more irritating than I may have
been") and Laurence Sterne ("Tristram Shandy interrupted as many
times as he wanted") – and suggested that such narrative quirks are
justified partly by how our brains work. “Minutes have a different duration in
our memories.”

Asked
why his sentences were so long, Marías borrowed a reply from William Faulkner:
“Because I’m not sure I’ll be alive for the next one”. Runcie observed that
they contribute to Marías’s “authority of rhythm”. The fact that this rhythm
appears to the reader to remain unbroken strikes Marías as “miraculous”, given his
writing process; he writes, as he puts it, not with a map, but with a compass
(“If I knew the whole story in advance I wouldn’t write it. I’d be bored”), and
he usually writes a page a day, but there are days – sometimes long stretches –
when he doesn’t have time to write at all. He told us that he was careful, when returning after
a break, not to read too many pages back to himself – “What if you don’t like
them?” – and referred to Jorge Luis Borges’s idea that a “definitive” text can
result from only two things: religion and exhaustion. (“Why should draft 12 be
more definitive than 11? . . . . And there’s always 13.”)

When
Runcie praised Marías’s forensic analysis of infatuation – “an accurate
portrayal of traumatic love” – Marías explained that the Spanish "Los
enamoramientos" has no perfect equivalent in English. “Infatuation” is
acceptable, he said, but it has a negative nuance that the Spanish doesn't have; the
Spanish is more simply “the process and the state of being in love”. As a title
it therefore gives less away. Being in love is something that has a rather
good reputation, said Marías. “Many think that it makes us better, more noble
. . . . It is also true that it may be the other way round . . . . I have seen
noble people act vilely.”

In
the question-and-answer session Marías said that he didn't read much literary
criticism, apart from reviews, but that a few books – including Mimesis
by Erich Auerbach (reviewed in the TLS by George Steiner in 2003) – had been very important to him; and that The Infatuations was perhaps his most pessimistic book, reflecting his belief that people, in
his own society at least, are more and more reluctant to take responsibility,
increasingly indifferent to crime and prone to blaming their situation – the
emotional legacy of their childhood, or the state of being in love – for their
misdemeanours.

Marías
didn’t forget to acknowledge the translator of his work, Margaret Jull Costa
(mentioned by Adrian Tahourdin in his round-up of the 2012 translation prizes):
“I have been very lucky . . . . She is very faithful. She finds very good
solutions . . . . The quality of the doubts and questions [she has] tell me
how good she is”. “I even think sometimes that my novels read better in
English.”

March 27, 2013

In
his recent review of the The Infatuations, Javier
Marías’s metaphysical murder mystery, Adam Thirlwell described Marías’s prose
as “sensual and philosophical, simultaneously . . . . His narrators can
drift for giant lengths, and yet still re-emerge, calmly, on to the same stage,
transformed by their reflections”. He went on to say that Marías’s
“acrobatics between paragraphs or chapters can only be coarsely
paraphrased”. So it was with interest that we gathered to hear Marías interviewed by James Runcie at the Southbank last week.
What would he say about his own acrobatics?

The
first thing he revealed was that he began The Infatuations with only a
vague premiss: he was interested in the idea of a woman who would stay with a
man who had caused her great harm. Doing so might be a strange kind of justice,
a compensation, he said; she might wordlessly be saying: “you must make up for
this by being by my side for ever . . . and my very presence will remind you
all the time of what you have done”.

His
next step was to consider what the man’s crime might have been. Then he
recalled something a friend had told him – for years she had observed a
particular couple in a café every day. But one day the couple stopped coming;
the man had been killed. The Infatuations duly begins: “The last time I
saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw
him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while
I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met . . .”. The “absolute
fiction” starts 25 or 30 pages in, depending on whether you are reading in
English or Spanish.

Like
much of Marías’s fiction (and a speech he wrote for the Spanish Academy),
The Infatuations addresses the impossibility of knowing anything or
anyone with absolute certainty. Narrating is something we do all the time, said
Marías; someone says “How are you?” and you reply – perhaps with an account of
your journey to work. “But even that small thing is very difficult to tell . .
. . You had one point of view; others had a different one . . . . It even
happens with history. It’s almost impossible to tell these things with
accuracy. [But] fiction does that.”

If
he had to say what The Infatuations was about, he’d say that it was about
secrecy and the convenience of secrecy, how "civilized" secrets can be. He
recalled a line from his novel A Heart So White (1992): “ears don’t have
lids that can close against the words”. “If you told me that you had killed a
woman in the park last night, I’d probably wish you hadn’t told me . . . . I
might think ‘James seems like a nice man. I don’t want him in prison, not
immediately at least' . . . .”

Moving
swiftly on, Runcie observed that the narrative of The Infatuations was
full of reflection – he referred to a passage in which a single conversation is
revisited again and again. “There are all kinds of novelists”, said Marías.
“Some perceive what is normally almost imperceptible and see the meaning in it
. . . . Say you spend the whole evening arguing with somebody . . . . It is very
likely that what remains in your memory is a small detail, a gesture or a look.
That’s what the novels pick up.”

Marías’s
narrators tend also to make a lot of literary references – to Balzac, Dumas and
Shakespeare, for example – but it is not in a metaliterary way, said Marías;
it’s “more in the way we all do it: ‘I’ve seen this film and I talk about it' .
. . ”. So the sequence in The Infatuations in which the narrator’s
lover relays the plot of Balzac’s novella Colonel Chabert – in which a
man mistakenly buried after the Battle of Eylau returns to Paris years later to
pick up where he left off – was not included for the sake of it; the story is
something you might dwell on naturally: “My own father died seven years ago”,
said Marías. “[Say] the dead came back five or seven years later . . . . We
inherited some money. Probably we’ve spent it by now . . . . And what about the
house? . . . It could really be a great misfortune if they came back . . . ”.

March 25, 2013

Tonight is Passover, a festival that has gone through various transformations in its three-thousand-year history. I'm not sure whether the first generation of celebrants descended from the slaves who fled Pharaoh's Egypt would have recognized cupboards swept clean of flour, children hunting for pieces of unleavened bread under sofa cushions, and representations of gruesome plagues in the form of finger puppets. But one of the things that helps a religious ritual to endure is its ability to move with the times.

Passover is a great story, full of tragedy, gore and vengeful triumph against the odds. And like all good stories, it has continued to evolve. Now it has gone virtual. The Haggadah – the 2,500 year-old text that describes the tale of the exodus and gives instructions for the order of the Seder – is available in app form.

The Haggadah App (Haggadap?) comes in "modern" and "traditional" Sephardi and Ashkenazi versions, and includes songs, pictures and videos.
The app, say the developers, is "an interactive and fully customisable e-book, created to help people of any level of religious knowledge or observance to prepare for the Seder and help them clearly explain the traditions to all participants".

Observers, or rather "users", are able to tailor the e-Haggadah "so that the running time is adjusted to their needs". They are also able to adjust the religiosity, making this suitable for revellers from "any kind of Jewish background".

While this venture is to be lauded for its enterprise and plurality, parents struggling to bar their children from hand-held devices at the dinner table may be rather less impressed. Confronted with the question "Why is this night different from all other nights?", some may be tempted to answer, "it isn't".

March 22, 2013

Here’s an aside to Ian Bostridge’s magisterial overview, in this week’s TLS, of several new books published to mark the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth. The YouTube-illustrated list below represents what one of those books reckons to be the current “Britten Top Ten” – ie, a list of his ten pieces that are “most popular with the public at large”:

1 The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

2 Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes

3 A Ceremony of Carols (so good he posted it twice, if only for the costumes, and the contrast between soprano and treble soloists)

4 Simple Symphony

5 Serenade for tenor, horn and strings

6 Soirées Musicales (intially taken here at quite a lick, as befits a precocious early suite inspired by Rossini)

7 “The Foggy, Foggy Dew”

8 A Hymn to the Virgin

9 “The Salley Gardens”

10 "Tell Me the Truth about Love" (the opening flourish puts me off this one – possibly a silly prejudice on my part . . .)

The source for this list is what used to be The Faber Pocket Guide to Britten by John Bridcut, first published in 2010, and now revised and elevated to the rank of Essential Britten. It’s a “delightful” compendium, according to our reviewer. There’s much more to the composer’s achievements, however, than the popular pieces mentioned above, as Bridcut is quick to point out. It contains “four or five indisputable masterpieces”, he says (although here he doesn’t say which ones; any guesses?), but it only covers “the first half of Britten’s composing life, and includes nothing sung in his fifteen operatic works”.

Funny he should mention that. This summer the Royal Opera House will tackle one of the most notoriously unpopular of those later operatic works: Gloriana, which seems to have discomforted its first audiences, in the Coronation year of 1953, by looking “beyond the cliché of the Elizabethan past as source of renewal”, as Ian Bostridge puts it, “to a more troubling mapping of that past on to the Elizabethan present”. Is this wise? Given the strength of feeling recently expressed against a mere novelist for daring to speak a troubling word or two about the Duchess of Cambridge, I’m not sure we Brits are ready to look beyond Britten’s top ten. . . .

March 21, 2013

“The public face of classical music in Welfare State Britain”, Benjamin Britten hobnobbed with the Queen Mother, wrote an enormous, expensive grand opera to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, accepted a life peerage and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Yet he retained a “resolutely workaday” musical philosophy, “concerned with usefulness to the community”, and consciously distanced himself from Romantic notions of greatness. Even at the height of Britten’s fame his work had its critics and its doubters, as it does today, in his centenary year; Ian Bostridge, the tenor renowned among other things for his interpretations of Britten’s vocal repertoire, puts the case for its enduring power.

In both his work and life Britten “swerved instinctively away from the centre ground”, not least in his homosexuality. Performing his settings of same-sex love poems with his partner Peter Pears was, he said, “rather like parading naked in public”. Bostridge reminds us that, though Britten and Pears were tacitly received everywhere as a couple, in 1954 over 1,000 men were in prison for homosexual offences. The poet and novelist James Lasdun had committed no offence beyond a “mildly flirtatious” exchange of emails with one of his creative writing students when he found himself being cyber-stalked and cyber-bullied. As “Nasreen”’s emails grew more abusive and threatening, Lasdun decided he had to fight back. His memoir of the episode, “an elaborate tale of psychological warfare and survival”, is reviewed by Elaine Showalter. Ten years ago, with his novel about a paranoid professor who believes he is being persecuted by women, Lasdun joined a distinguished company of writers in a sub-genre involving accusations of sexual misconduct that includes David Mamet, Philip Roth and J. M. Coetzee. Coetzee’s latest novel postulates a “new world” that resembles a socialist utopia, whose inhabitants are strangers to sex, irony and salt; a world in which “God and the truth are merely the storyteller’s playthings”, according to Edmund Gordon.

March 17, 2013

Genteelisms are a curse of modern life. The announcements on railway platforms and trains that many of us are subjected to most days are a particular case in point. I’m referring to such constructions as “We are sorry for the delay to your journey. This is due to a fault on a preceding train that cannot be rectified”. Preceding? Rectified? Does anyone use such words in spoken as opposed to written English? It’s a form of genteelism, born from a sense that plain words, such as earlier for “preceding” and fixed for “rectified”, are somehow not good enough.

The battle against the hideous use of the word “customer” to denote a passenger has long ago been lost. We are all customers on trains, enjoying the service being provided rather than merely getting from A to B. “Will customers standing please move down the carriage to allow other customers to get on” neatly encapsulates the absurdity of it. Some train guards persist, during their on-board announcements, in correctly addressing us as “passengers”; let’s hope their words aren’t recorded or they’ll probably be sent off for a re-education programme. (I should say that train guards, ticket inspectors - sorry, “revenue collection officers” - and platform staff are almost unfailingly polite and friendly; it’s not about them.)

Yet when there’s an incident on a train involving “customers”, I’ve noticed that they tend to be downgraded to passengers, as in “this is due to a passenger being taken ill on the train” or “due to passengers fighting in the Clapham Junction area” (ok, I made up the last one, but it’s broadly representative). Yes, they’re very keen on the word “due”.

On it goes: “Please be advised that this service has been cancelled”. Or “It has become necessary to cancel this train”. “Train doors may close 30 seconds prior to booked departure time”, and so on. “Prior to” is always a good unnecessary variant for “before”. Trains are “subjected to platform alterations” - poor trains.

I travel on the Brighton to London line, which is in the hands of two companies, Southern and First Capital Connect (or Disconnect, as I prefer to call it). Journey time from London to Brighton is less than an hour, yet you still hear announcements apologizing for the fact that “there is no first class accommodation on this train” - er, what would that be? Sleeping cars? Couchettes? On a 50-minute journey? Rather than “accommodation” do they mean seating perhaps? After all, why use a two-syllable word when you can shoehorn in a five-syllable one? Sounds posher, doesn’t it? These are all recordedannouncements, so they have the official seal of approval of the train company.

Does any of this matter? Well, it matters to me, clearly. I also think it does because, aside from the irritation it provokes, such corporate misuse of language - or call it a clumsy attempt to shield simple truths behind a fog of verbiage - speaks of a kind of contempt for the public. And that does matter.

March 15, 2013

All of a sudden I want to go to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. I hadn’t realized how spectacular it is: geometric marble and granite on the outside, and inside a massive soaring tower of bookcases encased in glass. And then there are the collections – ancient papyri, a Gutenberg Bible, Ezra Pound papers, Tocqueville manuscripts, Boswell family correspondence, the Mellon Chansonnier, sixteenth-century portolan charts, Alfred Stieglitz autochromes, a Gertrude Stein home movie . . . .

It was founded in 1963 by three brothers “linked from their earliest years by a deep affection, shared interests, and complementary though different talents and personalities”. It is celebrating its fiftieth birthday in style, as you might imagine, with a year-long programme of exhibitions, lectures, readings, concerts and conferences. Last week it honoured its international reach (it is open not just to its own students but to writers and researchers from all over the world) with a reception at the Athenaeum in London. Peter Ackroyd had been asked to say a few words about his own experiences at the library in the 1970s, when he was gathering material for his book on Modernism, Notes for a New Culture (1976; you can read the TLS's review of it here).

His first reaction to the building, he remembered, was surprise and admiration. “I wasn’t sure what it was. It was rather disorientating.” Nearby at that time was a sculpture by Claes Oldenburg of a cannon with a lipstick attached to it, which “added to a surreal Alice in Wonderland feel”. But the windows, he said, “shone with the light of interior knowledge . . . . The staff were as knowledgeable as any I have come across”. Judging by the atmosphere at the reception, its staff are also among the friendliest. Perhaps they are also among the most amusing. Ackroyd told us that when the library added his own papers to its collections – “much to my delight and pleasure” – he asked when the papers would be catalogued, and the conversation went on like this:

March 14, 2013

Pope Francis I has many strengths, including a humble streak, a degree in chemistry, and a burning commitment to fighting poverty. He moved from the archbishop’s palace in Buenos Aires into a small flat, and used public transport instead of a limousine.

As a pastoral bishop from outside Europe rather than a Vatican insider, he will know more than the other-wordly Benedict XVI about the lives of grassroots Catholics. Like his predecessor, though, the new Pope is intensely conservative on sexual morality, and has prompted complaints from politicians in the past for condemning gay marriage so fiercely.

He takes over a Church in crisis, and it will be a while before we can judge whether the conclave has elected a man equal to the challenges ahead.

Consider the following damning statements. “The Catholic Church is 200 years behind the times”. The scandal of paedophile priests should lead to a “transformation” in the way the organization is run. More broadly, the Church should “admit its errors” and introduce radical change, “starting with the Pope”.

These words come not from one of the usual suspects, but from Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who died last year and would himself have made a great reforming Pope.

Martini understood the crying need for greater transparency in the way the Catholic Church is run.

The world’s largest association is in so many ways a massive force for good. It is the biggest single supplier of healthcare and education on the planet. Visit the poorest places on earth, and you’re likely to find lay Catholics, nuns or priests supporting the most vulnerable. Their fellow believers champion the common good in a host of other situations.

But the contrast between heroism on the ground and the Vatican, which even Pope Benedict admitted to be riven by cliques and careerists, is glaring.

Fifty years ago, the Catholic Church reformed itself during and after the Second Vatican Council. Having previously turned its back on the world, condemning scientific developments, democracy and women’s rights, the Church began a grown-up conversation with modern society. The principle of “collegiality” – a technical term for teamwork – was championed.

Tragically, however, the revolution was stopped in its tracks – and then reversed – by Pope John Paul II. Strict central controls were reaffirmed, and with them the unaccountable power structures that had long blighted the Church’s reputation.

The joint architect of this regression was none other than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI. On becoming Pope himself eight years ago, he allowed a bad situation to fester. The absolute ban on artificial birth control was reaffirmed, as were the celibacy rule, the denial of Communion to remarried divorcees, and other teachings judged to be pastorally insensitive or incoherent by many. Catholics were banned from even discussing matters such as the ordination of women.

There is a link between such authoritarianism and the perverse management style that allowed paedophilia – along with other scandals, financial as well as sexual – to develop unchecked. So in addition to cleaning up the mess on his doorstep, Pope Francis would do well to introduce a more inclusive style of leadership overall. I hope that’s why the cardinals elected him.

March 13, 2013

William Styron died long before the days of blogging and Twitter. But had the author of The Confessions of Nat Turner faced the firing squads of modern times, it would not have been a pretty sight. In 1968, his bestselling re-creation of a slave hero merely roused ten black writers to publish a book of their own: “one long hysterical polemic from beginning to end”, Styron wrote in a letter to one of his former teachers. “Pure racism” was the response of one objector to the idea that Turner had “an uncontrollable desire to violate a white woman”. Styron’s attitude to African Americans changed thereafter, writes James Campbell, reviewing the selected letters of a slow-writing anglophobe with the acutest sensitivity to criticism of every kind.

David Foster Wallace famously shared with Styron the stimulus and curse of depression. His writing about the condition and its treatments was some of his best work. As Thomas Meaney describes this week, reviewing three new books on the writer, a short story from 1998, “The Depressed Person”, goes to the heart of Wallace’s work, and not just because we know now about his road to suicide a decade later. Meaney wonders whether ambitious young writers of the future will stick by Wallace or not, an artist who “demands a willingness to dirty your hands in the culture and to swallow boredom whole”.

Christopher Cusack considers the “booming business” in books about the “Great Irish Famine”, a topic in which political and historical controversy have long been mixed. A new atlas of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland includes maps and essays showing the differfent attitudes on opposite sides of the Irish Sea. The blight-prone potato was a sensible staple food for those who grew it, a symbol of indolence and bad character to those who ruled them. Historical analysis has made significant advance but interest in the Famine is still “entangled in its own rhetoric”.

Ruth Scurr praises a “snapshot of pure happiness” at the end of the myriad narratives in Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.